Page 47 of The Death of Vivek Oji

“I remember. Kavita, what—”

“What was that name you said we should give him?”

“Why are you—”

“Just tell me the name, Ekene. Please.”

He sighed through the line. “Nnemdi. It’s not a common name, but it was for Mama. Because they had that same scar on their feet.” She could almost see him shrug. “If it was our father who’d had the scar, he would have been named Nnamdi, you know? But Chika didn’t agree. If Vivek had been a girl, maybe he would have agreed. I don’t know. He was very somehow about the whole thing, so I just left it alone. Why are you asking?”

“Did you ever tell this to Vivek?”

“No. I only talked about it once, with Chika, before the naming ceremony. That’s it. What’s going on, Kavita?”

Kavita felt as if the breath had been snatched out of her lungs. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you back later.” She dropped the phone on his protestations and crumpled to the floor. How had—?If he had been a girl... What did that mean now? And he had ended up a girl anyway, with the name they had denied him—ended up beaten to death and thrown in front of his own front door, and she, his own mother, had known nothing about it because he didn’t trust her. Kavita sat on the floor, falling in and out of crying spells, until Chika came home and found her.

Kavita couldn’t even speak. She just pointed to the photos on the side table, and watched her husband walk over to it. His body was still lean after all these years, his arms swinging easilyfrom his shoulders, the back of his neck like a smear of clay. She watched as he picked up the stack and flipped through it, watched his eyebrows contract into a storm and his mouth open as he shouted, until his anger shook the glass in the picture frames on the wall. Then she told him what Juju and the others had told her, told him that Osita had known, and Chika raged even more, hurling the pictures away from himself until Vivek fluttered all over the parlor, settling on the carpet and sofa and side tables, his face frozen.

Kavita stared at her husband as if he was acting out her own confusion through the lines of his body. She told him their theory—that their son had died in the riot, had been beaten and stripped—and it was only then that the heat finally drained from Chika’s body and he collapsed next to his wife, his face like ash. Kavita knew the images that were playing in his head, knew that his anger at Vivek’s secret was washed away by the realization that someone else had killed him for it. At last, Chika dropped his head on Kavita’s shoulder and wept. She put her hand to his cheek, to feel the wetness there, and murmured words she couldn’t remember later.

—

That night, in bed, Kavita looked up at Chika from where her head was resting on his chest. “He was calling himself Nnemdi,” she said.

Her husband’s body stiffened.

“How did he know?” Kavita asked.

“How did he know what?” said Chika.

“That that was almost his name. Ekene said he never told him.”

“When did you talk to Ekene about this?”

“Before you came home. I called him. I wanted to know how Vivek knew that name.”

“You told Ekene?” Chika started to sit up, anger stirring again in him, but Kavita pushed him down.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I didn’t say anything. I just asked him if he’d ever told Vivek the name and he said no. He said the name was for Mama, because of Vivek’s scar. I always wondered about that.”

“Ekene was being superstitious. He should know better than to repeat such nonsense to you. Forget the whole thing.”

“But how did Vivek know?”

“I said forget it, Kavita!” Chika pushed her off his chest and turned over on his side, away from her.

She waited a little bit, then slipped an arm around him. “I want to visit his grave tomorrow.” She felt his muscles loosen and he gave her a brief nod.

“Go to sleep, nwunye m,” he said. “Enough of this name business.”

—

The next day, they went to the village house and stood at the foot of Vivek’s grave, with its large rectangular gravestone. Kavita couldn’t help but imagine, for a second, Vivek’s grandmother reaching out from her grave next to his, through her casket, through the soil, splintering the wood of his to takehis hand. At least he was not alone. They were together, the generations before and after, gone from the here and now, leaving the rest of the family floating in life.

Kavita knelt down and ran her hand over the inscription. Something felt off, wrong. “It’s our fault,” she found herself saying.

Chika looked down at her. “What’s our fault?”

“That he died like that, like an animal.”